apotheosis
on the idea of becoming more than what you were.
apotheosis. the moment a man becomes something greater than a man.
i first came across this word properly when i saw the painting - the apotheosis of washington. brumidi painted it on the ceiling of the US capitol dome in 1865. george washington, the general, the president, the man - ascending. surrounded by gods and clouds and the kind of grandeur that makes you feel small just looking at it. they made him divine. they painted him into the sky.
it's a strange thing to look at. a real man, painted into mythology.
and i kept thinking about it. not about washington specifically, but about the concept. apotheosis. the elevation of a person beyond what they were born as. the transformation from human to something the world agrees to treat as eternal.
it sounds arrogant to think about for yourself. and maybe it is. but i don't think the people who changed anything were ever thinking small about what they could become.
every person i genuinely look up to went through something like it. not the divine part, not the statues and the paintings, but the internal version — the moment where they stopped operating from who they were and started operating from who they were becoming. luffy does it every arc. he gets broken, completely, and then something shifts. he comes back operating at a level that shouldn't be possible yet.
that's apotheosis, just without the clouds.
the ceiling of the capitol is painted. you can't touch it. you can only look up.
i think about what my ceiling looks like sometimes. not in a sad way, more like - what am i being elevated toward? what version of me is the painting?
i don't have a clean answer. i'm still very much in the middle of it. still the general in the field, not yet the figure in the sky. but i think that's okay. washington had to live through valley forge before brumidi could put him in the clouds. the elevation only makes sense after the suffering it was built on.
so i'm not trying to become a god or anything. i just think there's something worth holding onto in this idea — that people can become more than what they started as. that there is a version of you that is so much larger than the current one, and the distance between them is just work and time and not giving up when it gets genuinely hard.
you have to survive valley forge first.
that's the part nobody paints.